Understanding Data Warehouse Appliance Solutions

A Data warehousing appliance is a linked set of hardware and software used for data storage, reporting, and analysis. This combines integrated servers, storage space solutions, operating systems, database management systems and other related software that are provided either as pre-installed applications or easy to install software only systems. These provide the business user with a set of tools for analysis of the stored data to provide insights that can improve the business process and better service delivery. They are especially suited for a mid-sized to large companies that deal with data quantities in the range of terabytes to petabytes.

The architecture consists of multiple parallel processing independent processors and servers acting independently but in synchronicity for low latency delivery. These servers operate self sufficiently and maintain individual control of their disk and memory functions. This enables the system to have high scalability and reliability with little contention involved. Scaling is done on a linear basis as new servers are added onto the network. This provides optimization focus rather than an emphasis on basic functionality limitations. There has been an increase in the rate of advancement of this technology tied to the increased availability of open source solutions. There are also useful UI solutions from Developer Express that caters to these needs.

The advantages of such solutions are one, increased flexibility for provided capacity and performance levels. The system is scalable to suit the needs of the user. The modular design employed facilitates easy addition of databases by administrators. Parallel processing increases performance where the servers available are increased. Two, cost effectiveness of the solution is inimitable. Management of data is an expensive affair. The total cost of ownership is factored by initial set up costs, maintenance and administration costs and cost of adding to available capacity.

However, data warehousing appliance solutions offer low entry costs and maintenance is easy which further lowers the cost. The eased monitoring and control of data reduces daily administration costs. Three, there is easy implementation of the chosen solutions. The solution vendor provides a complete package and also handles optimization and customization of the solution. This eliminates need for end user tests for integration and regression. Furthermore, problem diagnosis and solving is centralized, and this reduces the challenge and the time taken to resolve issues. Upgrades are undertaken from the single source and therefore take less time and are easy to do.